Introduction
Opening Passage: A bit long, but worth noting in full, both as a description of The Virginian and as capturing the overall style of the work:
Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window; and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was. I saw near the track an enclosure, and round it some laughing men, and inside it some whirling dust, and amid the dust some horses, plunging, huddling, and dodging. They were cow ponies in a corral, and one of them would not be caught, no matter who threw the rope. We had plenty of time to watch this sport, for our train had stopped that the engine might take water at the tank before it pulled us up beside the station platform of Medicine Bow. We were also six hours late, and starving for entertainment. The pony in the corral was wise, and rapid of limb. Have you seen a skilful boxer watch his antagonist with a quiet, incessant eye? Such an eye as this did the pony keep upon whatever man took the rope. The man might pretend to look at the weather, which was fine; or he might affect earnest conversation with a bystander: it was bootless. The pony saw through it. No feint hoodwinked him. This animal was thoroughly a man of the world. His undistracted eye stayed fixed upon the dissembling foe, and the gravity of his horse-expression made the matter one of high comedy. Then the rope would sail out at him, but he was already elsewhere; and if horses laugh, gayety must have abounded in that corral. Sometimes the pony took a turn alone; next he had slid in a flash among his brothers, and the whole of them like a school of playful fish whipped round the corral, kicking up the fine dust, and (I take it) roaring with laughter. Through the window-glass of our Pullman the thud of their mischievous hoofs reached us, and the strong, humorous curses of the cow-boys. Then for the first time I noticed a man who sat on the high gate of the corral, looking on. For he now climbed down with the undulations of a tiger, smooth and easy, as if his muscles flowed beneath his skin. The others had all visibly whirled the rope, some of them even shoulder high. I did not see his arm lift or move. He appeared to hold the rope down low, by his leg. But like a sudden snake I saw the noose go out its length and fall true; and the thing was done. As the captured pony walked in with a sweet, church-door expression, our train moved slowly on to the station, and a passenger remarked, "That man knows his business."
Summary: The narrator, who is never named, comes into Medicine Bow, Wyoming, in order to visit the Sunk Creek Ranch; he finds a few unexpected surprises. The first is that his luggage was lost; it's probably coming, but it got separated from him at some point. The second is that the Sunk Creek Ranch is not at Medicine Bow, which is just the closest train station -- the ranch is 263 miles away. Judge Henry, who owns the Sunk Creek Ranch, has sent one of his employees to escort him, a tall, handsome man with a Southern accent who is only known throughout the story as "The Virginian" (a friend once calls him "Jeff", and this is treated as his actual name in some adaptations, but in fact this is just a slightly derogatory general nickname for people from Virginia). The narrator also meets, briefly, The Virginian's old friend, Steve, who seems a very likable man.
While they are waiting for the narrator's luggage to arrive, The Virginian gets involved in a card game with a man named Trampas, also an employee of Judge Henry; it goes badly, and The Virginian ends up humiliating Trampas, earning his eternal enmity. This opposition between The Virginian and Trampas is the primary storyline of the book, and it will culminate in a series of events that will lead to The Virginian being put into an impossible position that will lead to him having to participate in a lynching against (among others) Steve, who has fallen into horse-thieving.
Much of the rest of the story involves the tenderfoot narrator getting used to the rough Wyoming life through various episodes, but one line that ends up being particularly important is The Virginian's meeting with Molly Wood, an Eastern girl who, restless at home, has come West to be the local schoolteacher. They are both obviously attracted to each other, and fall easily into banter and teasing, and The Virginian even begins reading Molly's favorite books in order to discuss them with her. But they came from very different cultural worlds -- one of the strengths of the social description in the book is that Wister does an excellent job at showing just how different their cultures are, sometimes almost foreign-country different, despite both being part of the United States. The romance is done quite well -- the back-and-forth between Molly and The Virginian is lively and clever. This storyline will culminate in Molly having to come to The Virginian's rescue when the latter is on the verge of death, which makes this an interesting case of a romance whose key event is the woman saving the man in distress. This is done quite deliberately; when you look over the romance story, it flips the standard expectations. While The Virginian is very much a stereotypical man, and Molly Wood a very feminine character, in the romance they often take the role opposite of what you might expect from typical romance conventions. The result is that both are quite well-rounded characters, and we get a much deeper insight into The Virginian's character than we would if we had only the very masculine adventures that arise from Trampas's attempts to revenge himself.
I listened to several radio adaptations of the story -- those of Frontier Theater (1947), Hallmark Playhouse (1949), and The General Electric Theater (1953). The narrator is often dropped, which significantly changes the tenor of the story. Unsurprisingly, both for this reason of narrative change and probably to fit their anticipated audiences, the adaptations flip the structure of the novel, making the romance the central story. The exception in the three radio adaptations is that of The General Electric Theater, which keeps a narrator, but minimizes his role in the story, and keeps the romance secondary, but lets it occupy a larger proportion of the overall time. This seems to be a different approach to creating the same general solution of telling the story in a very limited timeframe while leveraging the more immediate impact of the romance in giving events in the story weight; it is more successful for the purposes of adaptation but complicates abridgement of the story. The Trampas story is also usually shifted to focus much more on the tragic friendship between The Virginian and Steve, which is also (probably not incidentally) where it intersects with the Molly Wood storyline. The General Electric Theater version, in other respects the best as an adaptation, botches this portion by focusing on Trampas instead and rushing Molly Wood's crisis of conscience. It's just very difficult, I think, to fit a complicated story like this into an abridged format in a different medium.
One of the biggest effects of these kinds of changes, one which I think will go on to have a major influence on the Cowboy Westerns that The Virginian inspired, is that The Virginian becomes much more of a 'simple man'. This lets the adaptations give Molly the possibility of teaching The Virginian something or other about 'civilization'; this is absolutely not part of the book, in which the cultures of The Virginian and of Molly Wood are treated as being on par. In the book, The Virginian's letting Molly Wood teach him is an act of generosity and magnanimity on his part, something that he is doing deliberately in order to have more things to talk with her about and more excuses to see her, and Molly Wood in turn deliberately sets out to understand his own culture in its own right (a point that is emphasized by Molly's difficulties with getting her family back East to see the value of the match). The simplicity of the cowboy-hero would become a trope of the genre. In the book, however, The Virginian is not a 'simple man' at all; not only is he fairly solidly educated (even if in not as literary a way as Molly), he is an extremely, even deviously, cunning fellow, who is constantly approaching problems from an indirect and unexpected direction, and repeatedly outmaneuvers everyone else in the book, including, in very different ways, Trampas and Molly Wood.
The story also has a very deliberately constructed theme that does not come out in any of the adaptations: what is right in one context is not right in another, and what is wrong in one context is not wrong in another. This is explicitly discussed in a brief excursus on moral philosophy later in the book (which I intend at some point to discuss in a post), but it is put very vividly in one of the most memorable scenes of the book. The narrator had previously witnessed the back-and-forth ragging of Steve and The Virginian as friends, and Steve had called The Virginian at one point, "son of a ---"; the force of this is perhaps easily missed by readers of our day, since not only have we been subjected to the tiresome Millenial fashion of never-ending casual swearing, sapping all force from all cussing whatsoever, but 'son of a bitch' in particular does not usually come across as an especially terrible insult. In the day, however, it was one of worst possible insults you could apply to anyone. But Steve and The Virginian are friends, and then as now male friends might sometimes use insults as terms of affection. In the poker game with Trampas, however, Trampas gets angry with The Virginian and uses the same insult, which leads to The Virginian pulling a gun on him, because the insult is just that serious. Context matters to right and wrong. Almost everything The Virginian does can be interpreted as morally wrong, if you do not exercise the goodwill that is required to see why he does it in the circumstances in which he does it. To recognize how admirable he is, you have to be able to see how his actions are the right actions in his case, no matter how much they would be wrong in a different case. This thematic development gives The Virginian a moral complexity far greater than you usually find in later Cowboy Westerns.
Favorite Passage: There are many possible candidates -- the book is sometimes hilariously funny -- but the card scene with Trampas is hard to beat:
There had been silence over in the corner; but now the man Trampas spoke again.
"And ten," said he, sliding out some chips from before him. Very strange it was to hear him, how he contrived to make those words a personal taunt. The Virginian was looking at his cards. He might have been deaf.
"And twenty," said the next player, easily.
The next threw his cards down.
It was now the Virginian's turn to bet, or leave the game, and he did not speak at once. Therefore Trampas spoke. "Your bet, you son-of-a——"
The Virginian's pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas:—
"When you call me that, smile." And he looked at Trampas across the table.
Yes, the voice was gentle. But in my ears it seemed as if somewhere the bell of death was ringing; and silence, like a stroke, fell on the large room. All men present, as if by some magnetic current, had become aware of this crisis. In my ignorance, and the total stoppage of my thoughts, I stood stock-still, and noticed various people crouching, or shifting their positions.
"Sit quiet," said the dealer, scornfully to the man near me. "Can't you see he don't want to push trouble? He has handed Trampas the choice to back down or draw his steel."
[By Arthur I. Keller - https://archive.org/details/virginianhorsema00wistuoft, Public Domain, Link]
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
